parker higgins

Towards the beginning of this year I ran a Kickstarter campaign for a monthly zine of archival material from the year 1923.

I’m releasing new software today for solving crossword puzzles in the terminal. cursewords is a small Python program to open, navigate, and solve puzzles stored as .puz files. If you’re a Mac or Linux user, you can install it today by running pip3 install --user cursewords in your terminal, and then use the cursewords command to open a .puz file on your computer.

After a little over a year of service, @LinkArchiver, the Twitter bot that automatically made Internet Archive backups of the links you tweeted, has archived its last link. In that time it archived somewhere around 7.2 million links total from about 9,000 users.¹ The last link it archived was this LA Times story about Verizon throttling California firefighters, tweeted on Thursday morning.

Twitter should allow users to “hide” old tweets so that they are only visible to that user, and selectively “un-hide” individual tweets from that collection so that they once again become available at their original URL, in quote tweets and threads, and in sites where they are embedded around the web.

One thing I enjoy is Norway’s public service broadcaster’s production of a train ride from Bergen to Oslo, which was first broadcast in real time, over seven or so hours, in 2009. It’s predictably pretty quiet stuff, but—at least now that it’s on Netflix—there are in fact subtitles of what little dialog there is.

A little over a month ago, I launched one of the Special Projects I’ve been working on at my new job at the Freedom of the Press Foundation. The Threatened Outlets collection at Archive-It aims to capture the archives of news sites that we deem vulnerable to “the billionaire problem,” wherein wealthy individuals or organizations can eliminate unflattering coverage through litigation or by purchasing media companies altogether. From the launch announcement:

I had the opportunity to catch the new movie The Florida Project this week, without any background on how it was made or what it is about. That’s my preferred context for seeing movies, but it does sometimes lead to my feeling a bit adrift in the theater, or—in this case—stressed that something catastrophic was about to go down. Still, I feel like I end up with a better idea of what the movie is actually about if I don’t know the plot going into it. Here’s the trailer, if you want a sense of it.

When I decided to add realtime weather effects to @choochoobot, I knew there were a few qualities I wanted to find in a data source. Ideally I would find something free and reliable that didn’t require me to agree to many developer terms or sign up for an API token. Google shuttered its undocumented Weather API in 2012, and Yahoo’s offering, which has changed a few times over the years, now requires an account and a consumer key and secret.

As the “father of information theory,” Claude Shannon’s contributions to the development of modern digital technology are hard to overstate. That work puts him in the ranks of the Einsteins, Turings, and Feynmans of the world; somehow, though, he never seemed to get the credit and public recognition that those scientists received.

One of my goals while at Recurse Center has been to improve my ability to manipulate and visualize data sets. To that end, I’ve been toying around with the Social Security Administration’s baby name dataset, which records the number of babies born with each given name every year, both federally and at the state level. Because I’ve also been watching Star Trek: The Next Generation along with the Treks And The City podcast, I chose to dig into information about the name “Wesley.”